For a journalist, covering the EU has always been one of the toughest gigs around. Brussels? Oh. So. Boring. But not any more. The coming months will see the EU front and centre of the political debate not just in the UK but in many other member states as well.

The starting place for any democratic decisions about how we balance our rights to freedom against the need to compromise that freedom for the safety and security of the wider community should be that we should be free to do anything we want except if there is a compelling case why we should not.

The sighs of exasperation at Britain's continuing ambivalence over its EU membership can be heard all the way from Lisbon in the west to Bucharest in the east. It's not as if our EU partners don't have other things to worry about, above all the still unresolved matter of Greece's slow slide towards bankruptcy.

Theresa May and David Cameron say the Queen's Speech will contain proposals to limit the 'harmful activities' of extremists and to promote 'British values' and to stop activities that would undermine democracy. As simplistic political rhetoric it sounds a very obvious and desirable thing to do. Who can argue against that idea? But - it could be damaging to the very thing it is intended to protect.

The new Conservative government is hard at work cobbling together the catalogue of demands it soon must make on the European Union... Here are nine tips to the Conservatives which, given the level of ignorance in London about how the EU works, may be helpful.

So let us harness the fact that we have this incredible scenario where there is female representation. And let us use it to push all the political parties to talk in gendered terms, and acknowledge the fact that socio economic inequality in the UK is gendered. And it has to change.

We've hit the part of the General Election campaign that really starts to get on my nerves. The funny thing is, I genuinely think this vote could be one of the most interesting in the UK's history, given how disillusionment with large swathes of the political spectrum has resulted in no one party looking capable of gaining an overall majority...

On Sunday 22 March, David Cameron wrote in the Sunday Times an article entitled "Labour will make us as bad as France". Why thank you David, much obliged. As a French national I personally do not take offense though, for two reasons...

It's annoying when that sort of thinking applies to people. The fact that something as complex as a human being can be boiled down to their accent or their football team is a shame. But the deeper problem is that it happens to issues, too.

The dilemma in which Mario Draghi found himself over quantitative easing is emblematic of the state of the European Union as a whole. Like other of the EU's crisis management measures, the resort to QE has been criticised for being too little and too late...

I have rarely felt so ashamed, or so angry. David Cameron, it seems, regards it as a "moral duty" to cut taxes - but not to save desperate migrants from drowning in the Mediterranean. By comparison, Marie Antoinette ("let them eat cake") was compassion incarnate.

We can, with our technology, our material and our enviable financial position, intervene on the right side. We can fight the aggressors, the fascists, and rescue Iraq from the scourge of Islamist violence. But this is only possible in coalition, in alliance. Leaving the Kurds to fight the Islamic State alone is immoral; abandoning Iraq is equally bad; and letting the United States shoulder the burdens of internationalism alone fails the very definition of the term.

When the history books come to be written, someone will doubtless compare the self-immolation of the Tunisian street-seller Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2010, which sparked the wave of Arab uprisings, with the shot fired by the Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip that killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Each was a single act that no one could have foreseen would lead to the appalling carnage that followed. And each reshaped the world, destroying great political powers and sowing the seeds for future instability.

Since their removal from power this time last year, the Muslim Brotherhood has constantly been the focus of Egyptian headlines. But when, in early April, Downing Street ordered an inquiry into the group's 'philosophy, origins and activities', it entered the UK domestic political scene too...

Education secretary Michael Gove recently declared that all 20,000 primary and secondary schools in the UK, stating that this government 'will put the promotion of British values at the heart of what every school has to deliver for children'. But this raises several questions, most importantly: what actually are "British" values?

Less than a quarter of Britons trust MPs. This worrying fact was published in an IPSOS/Mori poll in December 2013. If you polled the same people today, that figure would be below a fifth, thanks to the renewed scandal Maria Miller has brought to the Commons.

It's time to turn Wordsworth on his head - in 2014 Britain it is not "very heaven" to be young; rather, it is the precise opposite. If you were careless enough to have been born in the 80s, 90s or 00s, well, tough. The likelihood is that you're going to end up worse off than your parents.

Ed Miliband's announcement that the Labour Party would only commit to an in/out EU referendum in the event of major EU treaty change sets up a significant fault line between his party's policy and that of the Conservatives.

Everything from friendships to schools to art and love has been productized and marketized until we no longer have a ready language with which to describe or ascribe value that doesn't have a price. The philosopher Michael Sandel has written brilliantly and extensively on the subject, asking if there is anything left which we aren't willing to buy and sell. Safety? Justice? Freedom? Your children?

The Chancellor may feel he only needs to announce tiny symbolic policy moves, given the recovery the economy is finally enjoying. But the government has so much more to do, particularly on the "PIM" policy areas of planning, immigration and money, if he wants to improve the long-term prospects for the UK's economic wellbeing.